First thing I thought of was the “Elementary School Musical” episode of South Park.

Sometimes you do it the hard way to send a message.

Given a bucket of ping-pong balls, how many could you throw and hit a dartboard on the wall 10 feet away? Now put a chain-link fence in front of the board, say, about 5 feet. We all know that a ping-pong ball is easily small enough to fit through a chain-link fence. Now how many could you hit the dartboard with, through the fence? How many would get through at all?

Obviously, the fence would have no effect, right? You just have to think about the size of the balls for a few minutes, and apply some common sense.

Right on. Just chiming in to say that everything you say is totally congruent with what I learned about the conservation movement in my environmental studies courses. I get plenty of reminders geographically, too, since I live not too far from the USDA Forest Products Laboratory on Gifford Pinchot Drive, as well a Muir Knoll, named for preservationist John Muir. The conservationists and the preservationists were ideological rivals—a store of resources for judicious human use vs. nature’s value pro se—and the modern environmental movement is much more aligned with the preservationists. The conservationist movement was more c*nservative, relatively.

I guess sometimes on social media, you run across a Two Minutes Hate gathering, where nuance is not welcome, without being able to realize it in advance.

The greatest trick that Satan ever pulled was to convince people to do his work in God’s name.

It does seem like YOLO = memento mori + carpe diem.

The irony of complaining about distracting features that nobody asked for in an article on a site that pops up a video player over the text…

I’m glad somebody else sees it, too. The Oct. 7th attack doesn’t make any sense, except to provoke Israel to overreact and draw other groups and countries into the fight. For fuck’s sake, Osama bin Laden straight-up explained this strategy to the world after the 9/11 attacks.

The IDF vs Hamas is an okay but cruel professional army against a relatively bad terrorist organization.

IDF was literally created by combining terrorist organizations, Haganah and Irgun being the big ones. So, unless the militant wing of Hamas is the cruel, professional Army, it’s terrorists vs. terrorists.

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That notice is not a legal restriction, nor a rule to stop stores from breaking up multi-packs. What it’s there for is to alert buyers and cashiers that the barcode printed on each unit contains the product code for the multi-pack. If stores want to sell individual units, they just have to re-label them, or at least not scan the barcode.

The store in which I used to work sells individual bottles of beer, or build-your-own 6-packs. The liquor department manager just puts a slash through the barcodes with a black marker, so they won’t scan on the registers.

Here’s the thing: We had to hold our noses and vote for Biden in 2020 to stop the fascists, yet they have advanced anyway. So we hold our noses and vote Biden again in 2024, and…

…what? The fascists decide it’s taken too long, and give up? Or does their movement continue to fester, and make gains in statehouses. It feels like the choice is between an autocratic President in 2025, or an autocratic President in 2029 when democratic norms are weaker.

And no, I don’t have a solution.

Similar to leaping out of the window of a burning building, I guess, a chance to figure out a way to survive on the way down instead of burning up?

Electing Biden in 2020 didn’t stop them. We’re closer to fascist dictatorship than ever. What will electing Biden this time around do to stop them, so that we’re not on the precipice again in 2028, if not earlier?

Random question: How come God always agrees with these loons in whatever kooky-ass shit they pray to Him about? Why does he never respond, “Lol, no, that’s dumb.”?

You say that, but there’s the anachronistic nautical slang “soger” for an inept or lazy sailor. It came from the soldiers assigned to British navy ships, who did not participate in the sailing of the vessel.

I chose those words carefully, and said Third Reich, not Hitler. Even the moniker “the final solution” comes from “the final solution to the Jewish question,” which implies that it had tried other solutions previously. The Nazis wanted Jews out of Germany, and as such had done things like encourage Jewish emigration to Palestine before the war. Then they escalated to pogroms and work camps, and before deciding on a Holocaust because they were losing the war and (edit, in retrospect not the correct interpretation) running low on resources, and that was the most expedient way to clear Jews out of Germany.

It’s worth remembering that history, since Israel now seems to be on a similar trajectory with Palestinians.

A critical analysis of past Israeli positions and current actions, basically. In brief, Israel refuses any solution that lets the people of Palestine stay, they can’t leave because they have nowhere to go, and Israel’s military policy is that it’s okay to kill them. The easiest path forward for Israel is genocide, and its current actions are congruent with that. (E.g. directing civilians to a place of refuge, and then bombing it.)

Remember, even Germany’s Third Reich didn’t set out to perpetrate a genocide, but circumstances drove them to it.

First, I know you’re not making the argument, the issues you raised made me think of related issues.

But to explain myself further, language and cultural differences are actually really minor, in the grand scheme of things. Minnesota has 13% of the U.S. refugee population. Wisconsin took in the Hmong. Dearborn, MI has a large Muslim population. It largely is not a problem. But, then, we’ve taken them in slowly.

The big issue is economic. It’s costly for countries to integrate large numbers of people all at once, what with the need for housing, food, jobs, et cetera. The issues in Europe, as I understand them, occur in refugee populations mired in poverty without support from the society to integrate.

Those same problems would bedevil any country, even if the refugees have the similar language and culture. Especially a couple million flooding in all at once. The racist part is overlooking those facts, and blaming Arab countries for not doing what we are not willing to do ourselves.

This is not a direct response to your comment, it just triggered a thought: The notion that neighboring Arab countries should take in Arab refugees, because Arab, is super-racist when one stops to think about it. The flip side of that argument is that Europe has no responsibility to take in African refugees because they’re “not like us,” and the United States is justified in turning away Central American migrants because “we have too many of ‘those people’ here already.”